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10 thoughts on ““That’s Just How White Folks Will Do You””

As I wrote in Gateway Pundit, obviously folks haven’t read the book and are playing gotcha games with snippets. Here is the surrounding paragraphs of that statement in Senator Obama’s book:

“”At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own. It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage. And it was there that I would meet Ray and the other blacks close to my age who had begun to trickle into the islands, teenagers whose confusion and anger would help shape my own.

“That’s just how white folks will do you,” one of them might say when we were alone. Everybody would chuckle, and my mind would run down a ledger of slights: the first boy, in seventh grade, who called me a coon; his tears of surprise (“Why’dya do that?”) when I gave him a bloody nose. The tennis pro who told me that I shouldn’t touch the schedule of matches pinned to the bulletin board because my colour might rub off; his thin-lipped, red-faced smile – “Can’t you take a joke?” – when I threatened to report him.

That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know that they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserving of their scorn. White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a nonnative speaker tripping over a difficult phrase. Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false. Or I would be helping Gramps dry the dishes after dinner and Toot [his grandmother] would come in to say that she was going to sleep, and those same words – white folks – would flash in my head like a bright neon sign, and I would suddenly grow quiet, as if I had secrets to keep.

Later, when I was alone, I would try to untangle these difficult thoughts. It was obvious that certain whites could be exempted from the general category of our distrust: Ray was always telling me how cool my grandparents were. The term white was simply a shorthand for him, I decided, a tag for what my mother would call a bigot. And although I recognised the risks in his terminology – Ray assured me that we would never talk about whites as whites in front of whites without knowing exactly what we were doing. Without knowing that there might be a price to pay. But was that right? Was there still a price to pay? That was the complicated part, the thing that Ray and I never could seem to agree on.”

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that someone would selectively take clips of Obama reciting of some of the things he heard or experienced or said devoid of any context, and turn around and present them “in his own shocking words”.

Shocking? Yea, that’s one heck of a stretch. Inspector Gadget and Mr. Fantastic are inconsolable right now.

Hey Chen, I bought the book for myself, which I’ll be reading soon in its full context. Something tells me I’m still not going to be impressed:

From Coulter, among many others:

When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”

First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign. But moreover — he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: “Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.” Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?

Also taken out of context, I suppose. Where will the goal posts go, I wonder, after I’ve read the book *in context* and still find it angry and absurd?

“Ray”, (or Keith Kakugawa) the angry young black man that Obama has all these heated talks about race with, says they didn’t happen:

He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race. “Not even close,” he said, adding that Obama was dealing with “some inner turmoil” in those days.

“But it wasn’t a race thing,” he said. “Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull].”